Other hotel staff members and relatives curled up on a bench. They watched a TV soap and were in the middle of the usual scene with the father dying and the daughter at his bedside, crying. This scene was played over and over again a thousand times on Asian soaps. The father was miscast; he looked ten years younger than his TV daughter, and the heavy make-up on his dying face had liquefied under the TV studio lights and was running down his cheeks. He looked as if he were melting like the bad witch in the Wizard of Oz.
The story took a sudden, unexpected turn that took it into the realm of science fiction movies. One of the Monorom maids started weeping, the tears rolling down her face. The dying father was a tearjerker every time. Most of the girls had lost their fathers. They were reliving this TV moment as if it were happening to them. The wasting, dripping image of a man slipping away, and the despair of the daughter unable to save the man they called father. They could talk to strangers with total detachment and continue to smile. Yet the TV death of a fictional father moved them to tears and weeping. Go figure, thought Calvino. Had people all over the world been so numbed by reality that they only gave themselves over to make-believe characters and stories? He pushed the button for the elevator, watching the figures in front of the TV. He no longer understood what he saw. He had not decided whether the person waiting for him inside his room had come to tell him a sad story or to kill him.
EIGHT
PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
HE STOOD OUTSIDE the door to his room. Listening to his heart and then the familiar sound of gunfire in the far distance; it was muffled, echoing off distant walls. The exact direction of the gunfire was as impossible to determine as the reason for the shooting. His heart pumped inside his chest fed by the anxiety that comes from thinking someone is about to cause you injury. Maybe kill you. In Cambodia such feelings were not paranoia; people without such an instinct died quickly, those with the instinct lived longer, hearts thumping, waiting in the land of secrets, waiting to locate the gunfire before planning an escape. He was buying time. He thought about Pratt playing the sax in the room above. The smart move was to go up and ask for back-up. Running to Pratt for help. That’s the way it would come out—as if he couldn’t take care of himself. He would have to disclose a secret. That he was afraid. This was one secret a man wanted to keep to himself.
He thought about how Scott had never lost an opportunity to remind him the Americans had waged a secret war in the 70s. And there had been secret executions by the Khmer Rouge. Secret arms deals with the Chinese in the 80s. Secret business deals with the Thais for gems and timber in the 90s. Before them had been the French, who built villas for them- selves and prisons for the locals. Every decade had spawned new secrets and conspiracies. And the old sinners never left. The French, Americans, and Chinese still had people in place. The Khmer Rouge still had an army in place. Sinning never stopped, it only shifted countries, regions, ideologies, finding a new source of victims. Cambodia was a land with nothing written down; with everyone on the run, in hiding, waiting, listening to gunfire they couldn’t locate, wondering what secret plot was being hatched to throw the people into the sky again.
He touched his face against the door to his room. He listened. There was only his heart and gunfire noise. Someone coughing in another room down the corridor. The metallic sound of the elevator starting a journey between floors. In a land of secret transactions which made it easier for strangers to find a way into your hotel room during your absence.
Calvino was told that there was a woman waiting for him in his room. He had this information on the word of a Khmer doctor smoothing the seams in her first pair of black nylon stockings in a long time. But he was in Phnom Penh and like just about anywhere else trusting the word of someone who had given out the key to his room for a pair of nylons was not only foolish—it was dangerous. Trusting a doctor who could be bought with stockings ranked with taking Fat Stuart’s advice on a horse race. Calvino’s law—An old Asia hand after ten years finds he has only scratched the surface; after twenty years, he finds there never was a surface to scratch—just a system of disconnected interiors with nothing holding them together. Whoever had bribed her way into his room was motivated by something other than romance; more likely, she was looking for a cash or emotional advance or chance to even an old score. Whatever the reason it didn’t seem to come to anything connected with his personality and charm.
He stood in front of the door to his room, thinking he should simply turn and walk away. That was the smart thing to do. Forget the machismo trip. Don’t let his Italian blood make him do something irrational. But he knew he was going inside. Nothing was holding him back. Except a question. Why wasn’t there a sound of her presence? Not a radio. Nothing. Silence came ready inflated with expectation, evil, and ennui. It was up to the listener to judge and pick among the choices. He tried the door and found it unlocked. Looking down at the floor, he saw a rim of light under the door. Someone waited in the silence with a light advertising their presence. This was one of those moments of truth. Would Thu have given a fine pair of nylons to the doctor at the reception desk? Perhaps it was a pass through—an UNTAC soldier had given them to Thu and she had given them to the doctor, where the nylons had found legs to wear them?
His hand on the door, he squeezed his body to the side and swung it open. He had carefully withdrawn his .38 Police Special from his shoulder holster, and slowly took a look inside, then slipped inside the room, assumed the Weaver Stance, both hands cupped around the .38. He crouched in the firing position. He swept the room, finger on the trigger, ready to fire. Ms. Thu was not in the room. But Carole Summerhill-Jones was. She licked her finger, and without looking up, turned the page of her paperback book. She lay naked in bed wearing a double strand of pearls around her neck. Beneath the pearls were her plastic press cards worn like dog tags. Some foreign journalists wore all the cards from all the war zones like badges of honor; they confirmed that the wearer was a veteran, had been at the front, had seen it all, knew the score, and above all had survived each and every battle. The plastic cards made Carole part of a special tribe. The pearls made her part of a special class. The woman was naked but had enough information hanging around her neck to make her look like part of an information highway. For those who knew how to ride such highways. Calvino had been around Asia long enough to see this woman was wearing a thirty-four-volume encyclopedia. Overhead a lamp shone on her as she lay reading Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Beside the bed was an ice bucket containing an unopened bottle of champagne. He dropped his .38 Police Special to his side.
Carole Summerhill-Jones glanced over the top of her book, smiling. He pulled back his jacket to expose the leather holster.
“You look kinda cute when you’re about to kill someone. Did you know that? Don’t put your gun away. I want to see it,” she said.
“Didn’t your mother teach you not to play with guns?”
“She taught me to be careful with my barrel,” said Calvino as he moved to the edge of the bed.
“Closer,” she said.
He felt awkward with the gun now no more than a foot away from where she lay on the bed. She had set the book to the side, used her long nails to rip open the plastic condom wrapper and then expertly removed the lubricated condom.
“What do you think you’re gonna do with that?”
“Play safe,” she replied, slipping the condom over the barrel of the .38. It fit snugly, giving his .38 Police Special a new personality like a midget-sized Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard. She made a great play of licking her finger and running it down the length of the condom-wrapped barrel, then she touched it with her tongue.
“It tastes different on a gun barrel,” she said, leaning back on the bed.
Calvino stared at his gun sporting a limp raincoat.
“I guess that means you’re happy to see me,” said Calvino.
“You’re not mad?” she said, picking up her book.
“Yes, but I’m not angry,” he said. “I
like the pearls. They make me hungry for oysters. The kind we used to get on Long Island. The press cards are flashy. Like Long Island teenagers looking for peer recognition.”
Her forefinger toyed with the double strand, twisting them one way and then another, until they wrapped around her hand. She lifted one of the press cards and showed it to Calvino. The way she held it was like one of the old guys from New York would show a medal from World War II; that was the last war—except for maybe Korea—that medals of honor gave the owner any pride.
“My father gave them to me when I came back from Kabul in ’85. Mother said he paid twenty-five thousand. I made a scene. He shouldn’t have done it. I think he was trying to upstage me. Or bribe me to stay at home. Father’s deep. One never knows his real motive for a gift. Only there always is one. Now the pearls are worth about fifty. Father has a good eye for an investment, wouldn’t you say?”
“Depends,” said Calvino. “On what?”
“Whether you have a future to invest in.”
Her blue eyes widened. “I’ve always wanted to fuck a private eye. I found your card. Vincent Calvino, Private Investigator, Bangkok. You didn’t look like a correspondent. Or talk like one. Nothing fitted. So I asked around. No one had ever heard of you or your newspaper. I checked with a friend in UNTAC press relations.”
“Did you give him a pair of nylons?” asked Calvino.
“Two rolls of Kodak film. Father said in this life no one does anything for free.”
“So you make a point of finding everyone’s price,” said Calvino. “What’s mine? Chilled champagne?”
She ignored the verbal punch. “UNTAC press says you have major connections with UNTAC Civ Pol. I’ve always been a groupie for men with big connections.”
“Like Mike Hatch,” said Calvino.
“I wondered when you’d bring him up.”
“I hope I didn’t disappoint you.”
“You can put away your gun,” she said.
He took off his jacket and flung it on a chair. His leather holster was under his left arm, with the straps crisscrossing his back. He stood with one hand planted on his hip and the other holding the .38 Police Service revolver.
“Is it okay if I remove the Durex from my gun?”
“Think of it as American gun control.”
“We were talking about Mike,” said Calvino, pulling off the condom and holstering his .38 Special. There was something in Carole that reminded him of Alice Dugan, the Canadian Embassy’s Third Secretary, something direct, in the face, coming straight at him.
“You were talking about him.”
“And?”
“I ran into your tramp friend at the Gecko Club. Del Larson is weird. Fucked up. Living in fantasy time. Lost in Asia. But I like that kind of man. He said Mike hung around the Russian market most afternoons. Scoring pot. The usual action. And then guess what?”
“You found Del’s price,” said Calvino.
“I didn’t have to. Mike Hatch showed up at the table. He bought dinner,” she said with the pride of someone back from a conquest.
“What happened to your clothes?” asked Calvino, taking off his necktie and tossing it at the chair. It missed and landed on the floor.
“I got hot waiting.”
“Or is screwing to get what you want just another price you’re willing to pay?”
“You’re a bastard,” she said, covering her breasts with the novel.
“Isn’t that the conventional wisdom? All white men are evil bastards and all white women are oppressed saints?” he asked, stepping out of his shoes and unbuttoning his shirt.
“I could make up my mind to write you off. And that would be too bad. Because then you wouldn’t know where to meet Mike Hatch tomorrow.”
“But you won’t. And you know why? Because I like your pearls,” said Calvino, sitting shirtless on the edge of the bed, his fingers lifting the pearls from her chest.
“When was the last time you looked twice at a white woman?”
“When you could open a door for a white woman without being slapped for treating her as an inferior,” said Calvino. That wasn’t exactly true. He had looked more than twice at Dr. Veronica.
“Which was about the last time you tried using foreplay?”
“What time am I meeting Hatch?”
“Are you planning foreplay with Mike? Men really can’t handle sex all that well. It makes them uncomfortable, even nervous to fuck a woman on an equal basis.” She giggled.
He leaned on his elbow, watching her staring at the ceiling and laughing.
“Fucking on an equal basis. No problem. But debating about equality while I fuck. Now, I have a problem with that. Maybe this is New Age sex with an American. I can’t say. I’ve been away a long time.”
“Don’t worry, it shows.”
“Look, it’s kind of important I talk to Hatch.”
“Why should I help you?”
“Because I’m gonna let you reform me. Show me the path to sexual equality, happiness, and duty-free champagne. And besides, that’s the price of breaking into my room,” said Calvino.
“He said five o’clock. But you know men. They rarely show up on time and when they do, they’re usually drunk.”
“Depends on the kind of man you’re waiting for,” said Calvino.
“None of them can be trusted,” she said. She twisted the cork on the 1985 Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin champagne bottle between her fingers until it popped out, striking the ceiling with a slanting, dull thud and falling harmlessly at Calvino’s feet. She hadn’t spilled a drop. He wondered how many bottles of champagne you had to open before you reached that degree of perfection.
“Want a drink?” she asked. “It might make it easier for you to relate to me as a person.”
“I would hate for you to drink alone.”
She filled his glass to the halfway mark with champagne and then poured another glass for herself. The way she handled the champagne bottle and glasses confirmed that she had grown up opening and pouring bottles of champagne as if it were second nature, in the way the poor draw water from a well. After the third glass of champagne they had both unwound. His shoulders and neck started to relax.
“When is the last time you fucked a white woman?” she asked.
He smiled, narrowing his eyes and pretending to count, extending one finger at a time. First she had asked when he had last looked twice at a white woman and now she charged in with the real question she had wanted to ask.
“About ten years ago,” he said.
“I was still in graduate school ten years ago. I went to university at one of those places where people didn’t date. They just fucked. It was the culture,” she said, sipping her champagne. “Enough about me. I suspect that you are on a strictly Asian girl diet. Or is there a special Asian girlfriend on the menu?”
“The menu is full of specials,” he said.
“Is that because you’re afraid of someone of your own age with a working brain?”
He thought of Kiko, his Japanese girlfriend, who had returned to Japan over six months ago. Bangkok had gone too far for her—the traffic, dust, noise, corruption, and levels of pollution that turned the airwaves, rivers, klongs and streets into highways of poison and filth. She was roughly his own age and had more brains than any other woman he had known. Enough brains to have ended the relationship. With Thailand and with him. Nothing too personal. He couldn’t blame her for going. She couldn’t blame him for staying. And Kiko had a kid to think of. But none of this stopped him from missing her.
“If you’re asking, ‘Are you afraid to fuck me?’ the answer has nothing to do with fear. There are other emotions more powerful than being afraid . . .”
“So you’re a private-eye intellectual.” She rolled over on her stomach and took his phone off the hook. “What are these other emotions?”
“Maybe you won’t respect me in the morning,” he said, looking over at the phone. “Are you expecting a phone call? Maybe a fundraiser f
rom your university.”
She giggled. “You’re cute. Dangerous. But definitely super cute. And I really hate interruptions.”
He leaned forward, brushing his lips against hers. She set down her champagne glass, licking her lips. “That tasted better than it looked. I would like some more, please,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“I take that as consent.”
“You don’t need it in writing.”
“That’s a relief.”
“So tell me something I don’t know about you,” she said. Personal secrets were difficult to keep buried with someone like Carole. She drew them out. A kind of fucking-therapy. The pattern of sex—coupling; once coupled, she talked about what she liked, what she wanted, what she had done before.
After a while she stopped talking. Carole’s groans broke over the gunfire outside. He saw her face, eyes closed, and her mouth tight. That was the present. The sexual present tense of living. Then his own eyes closed and as they moved together, he ran through old terrains, back alleys, faces—dead and alive, people—wanted and not wanted, and with those memories one would emerge from the others, lock in, and he would watch the sun falling on long hair.
“Tell me what you are thinking,” she whispered in his ear. He was thinking of someone else in Bangkok. Did she really want to hear about that?
“You can tell me anything,” she said.
So Calvino told her about a bargirl’s face which never came into focus. He tried to pull down the image, clean and sharp, but it wouldn’t hold and it didn’t matter anyway. Because he knew her story. He had been part of it at one time. But what did Carole know of the story in Southeast Asia? What she had read or heard about the bars. No one who cruised the bars in Asia had any sense of the true suffering, desperation, the defeat inflicted on people until they learned the local language and talked to a bargirl as another human being. There was a risk to the experiment. You had to be prepared for one horror story after another; one narrative from hell where failure, poverty, and abuse seeped through the surface of bamboo huts upcountry. The brutality of her early life ruined her dreams like a stained-glass window splattered with dirt. She saw you as someone she expected, the heir to her early years when men like L’Blanc and Hatch grabbed her in private places. There was no father waiting with a strand of pearls. She was tough and would say or do anything she thought would part you from your money. She had heard every bullshit line ever invented. Getting through the shell took a sledgehammer and a lot of time. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the effort. Most of the time it was impossible. But if you succeeded, then you would find she was all hard shell with nothing inside.
Zero Hour in Phnom Pehn Page 15
